Consider the fact that in the course of our lifetime we all used to take pictures with film and today virtually all of us only use digital photography. The great innovation that most of us remember in the film processing era was one-hour photo processing. Oh my gosh – ten days down to drop it off before lunch and pick up pictures and film after lunch!
But, if you were taking a specific picture of something and you saw your shots didn’t get it quite right, you still had to wait and take the picture again.
Then came digital photography. Take the picture, look at it, adjust and shoot again. What amounted to “instant” processing.
We’ve all gotten used to instant with the speed of modern digital communications.
But, with relationships, we need to balance the instant information (the so-called Google effect) against the reality that human relationships build over time. Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers says it takes 10,000 hours to become proficient at basically any endeavor: to learn a language, learn a musical instrument or learn to cook. But the same “proficiency” applies to relationships I think.
As fund raisers pass from the slow analog print and ink world to the many forms of digital instant communications, we still need to be mindful that building relationships with our donors is a lifetime pursuit and not a Google moment.
-Mike
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